Secondly, all employers must provide suitable facilities for a pregnant woman or nursing mother to rest, which should include somewhere to lie down. Under the Working Time Regulations 1998 you are entitled to at least 20 minutes uninterrupted rest break if you are working more than 6 hours.

Legally, pregnant women can continue to work the average 40 hours a week or the hours that they were working previously. However, a pregnant employee must only continue to work these hours if it is safe to do so, physically and emotionally.

Are You Working the Infertility Shift? Women who work the night shift often have a harder time getting pregnant than those who work the day shift. For women, working the night shift can impact their circadian rhythm, resulting in hormonal imbalances, lower estrogen levels, and irregular menstrual cycles.

Most women can physically handle their usual workload up until about 32 to 34 weeks of pregnancy. Around this same time, many women are also shifting their mental focus from their job towards being a new mother, and that can affect the decision on when to stop working.

A pregnant employee says she needs to take frequent toilet breaks or extra breaks because she is feeling sick. What must I do? You must allow her to take breaks to go to the toilet or if she is feeling sick.

It’s acceptable to wait to tell your boss until your pregnancy is 14 to 20 weeks along. That way, you can also point out you can still do your job while carrying a child. If you can, consider timing your announcement to coincide with the completion of a project or another milestone.

For many newly pregnant people, waiting until 12 weeks no longer makes sense. In the United States, there’s a widely practiced custom of waiting to tell people that you’re pregnant until you’re 12 or 13 weeks along—at the end of your first trimester.

In other words, at 10 weeks pregnant, you may be just starting to show. That’s because your ever-growing uterus is now slightly larger than a grapefruit. But don’t worry if you can’t quite see your bump at 10 weeks yet — you will soon enough. Remember that pretty much anything is normal when it comes to your baby bump.

Pregnancy lasts for about 280 days or 40 weeks. A preterm or premature baby is delivered before 37 weeks of your pregnancy.

In general, infants that are born very early are not considered to be viable until after 24 weeks gestation. This means that if you give birth to an infant before they are 24 weeks old, their chance of surviving is usually less than 50 percent. Some infants are born before 24 weeks gestation and do survive.

If your pregnancy is healthy, it’s best to stay pregnant for at least 39 weeks and wait for labor to begin on its own. When you schedule your baby’s birth, you schedule either labor induction or a c-section.

Boys are 14% more likely to be born prematurely than girls, according to new figures, which show an extra 5,700 boys are born early each year in the UK. Data for 2012 reveals there were 34,400 boys born under 37 weeks in the UK, compared with 28,700 girls.

The myths

• Morning sickness. You may have heard that the severity of morning sickness is a clue about your baby’s sex.
• Skin condition. Some people believe that a girl baby will steal the mother’s beauty.
• Cravings. With boys, you crave salty and savory foods like pickles and potato chips.
• Heart rate.
• Carrying.

According to this method, to increase the chance of having a girl, you should have intercourse about 2 to 4 days before ovulation. This method is based on the notion that girl sperm is stronger and survives longer than boy sperm in acidic conditions. By the time ovulation occurs, ideally only female sperm will be left.

It’s a boy if:

• You didn’t experience morning sickness in early pregnancy.
• Your baby’s heart rate is less than 140 beats per minute.
• You are carrying the extra weight out front.
• Your belly looks like a basketball.
• Your areolas have darkened considerably.
• You are carrying low.
• You are craving salty or sour foods.

It claims that within 10 minutes of taking the urine test, a woman will be able to tell her baby’s gender. The specimen will turn green if it’s a boy, and orange if it’s a girl.

Research shows girls kick as often as boys. Babies who kick a lot in the womb are also more active after birth. Some mothers have more trouble feeling the kicks than others. If the placenta is on the front side of the womb, or if you are overweight, you will feel the kicks less.

The baking soda gender test is an at-home method that involves combining a pregnant woman’s urine with baking soda to see if it fizzes. Whether or not the urine fizzes is supposed to determine whether the baby is male or female. The baking soda gender test actually looks to determine the baby’s sex, not its gender.

Research over hundreds of years has consistently found that boys naturally outnumber girls at birth. While historically, there have been about 105 boys born for every 100 girls worldwide — which creates a “sex ratio at birth” of 1.05 — the share of boy babies has increased in recent decades.